Patrick Stewart premiered his new film Match at the Tribeca Film Festival and gave an exclusive interview with Uinterview about the film.

Stewart stars in the film, alongside Carla Gugino and Matthew Lillard, as Tobias, a renown classical dance teacher of Juilliard. Written and directed by Stephen Belber – who also wrote the original play the film is based on – Match is a low budget movie filmed on location in New York City. Stewart revealed that the small budget made the production that much more thrilling and challenging creatively.

“You have to be creative and inventive. Our movie was made for less than half a million dollars. We filmed it, I think, in 15 days, almost every hour of everyday, spent in a real apartment in New York,” Stewart said of the shoot.

Furthermore, Stewart spent a great deal of time on location in a New York apartment, and admitted to being sad when it came time to leave.

“We had our breakfast in the apartment, we had our lunch breaks in the apartment, I would sleep on the sofa if I got a twenty minute cat-nap – it had become home, and saying goodbye to it was quite emotional,” Stewart told Uinterview.

Stewart, already an established actor, told Uinterview he enjoyed the role because of his many nuances and the darker sides of Tobias that are revealed throughout the film.

“If those transformations don’t exist, then the piece is not worth your time,” Stewart said.

Working in New York was, no doubt, another thing that attracted Stewart to the project. The self-declared New Yorker said that being in New York City is still just as thrilling as it was when he first arrived:

“I got off a bus on 72nd street in 1969 or 1970 to do a play with the Raw Shakespeare Company… and I instantly felt not only at home, but very stimulated by being in New York, and that’s never gone away.”

Match will be screened one more time at the Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday, April 24.

Olivia Truffaut-Wong

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